Free Turtle Baby by Abigail Padgett Page A

waiting for her in the carpeted lobby of St. Mary's Hospital for Children, holding Acito's medical records and a nosegay of white violets. Beneath his starched lab coat an oxford cloth shirt in eggshell and a surprising silk tie painted in taupe and cream asters made his gray eyes seem almost blue.
    "For you," he said, proffering the nosegay. "My lady."
    "Oh, God, Andy," Bo replied, pleased but aware that everyone in the lobby might be watching, "thank you. They're lovely, really, but ..."
    "It's a summer day," he insisted, ushering her toward the hospital's glass-walled cafeteria. "Flowers before business. I'd like to see you tonight, Bo." Beneath a graying brown mustache his smile was confident, almost impish.
    Not for the first time Bo experienced a familiar conceptual lurch at the warmth of that smile. The warmth of the man, who had proven to be a stalwart friend as well as a tantalizing potential lover. Except that he insisted on muddying the situation with archaic references to love and marriage.
    "Andy, we just don't have the same agenda," Bo said as he paid for two coffees and accompanied her to a cement table in the cafeteria's outdoor courtyard. "I'm not the marrying kind. My attention span's too short."
    "Nonsense," he murmured.
    "Andy, that was a joke. Now, tell me about this poison."
    He opened the record file and handed Bo duplicates of several pages. "It's a substance called abrin, derived from a tropical plant. It has no known use in any commercially produced product either here or in Mexico, and in fact would be very difficult to acquire. One would almost have to grow, harvest, and store it deliberately. It's quite unusual, Bo. There's simply no way a baby could accidentally ingest it."
    Bo ran her right hand through her hair and pursed her lips. An image of jars full of herbs rose in her mind and refused to vanish. Chris Joe Gavin, boy-guitarist, had a thing for dried plants.
    "As the mother is a native of Guatemala, it may be possible that she has some knowledge of tropical plants, perhaps even of primitive medicine ..." Andrew LaMarche suggested somberly and then stopped as Bo's green eyes turned pine-dark at his words.
    "Why would Chac want to poison Acito?" she demanded. "She adores that baby. She even wrote a song for him. And what, exactly, do you mean by 'primitive'? Surely not the thousand herbal remedies drug companies are scrambling to document and produce synthetically?" Bo rummaged in her purse for a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke in an eloquent column over her right shoulder.
    "My sister, Elizabeth, quite smoking a couple of years ago," LaMarche mentioned to a cement bowl of pink lantana on the table. "She said it was like having to learn to talk all over again."
    "Please give your sister my regards when you speak to her," Bo muttered, letting the cigarette hang from the corner of her mouth in a manner reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart. A trench coat, she realized, would be a big help.
    "Actually, I'll be seeing her on Monday," he said, inspecting immaculate, buffed nails. "I'm flying down to Louisiana to be an expert witness in a New Orleans case. Lafayette's only a short drive from there. I thought you might like to join me."
    "I have a job, Andy. That precludes almost all impromptu jet-setting. And why would you want me to go, anyway?"
    "To meet my family." His smile was a cross between a sort of mannered lechery and something deeper. "I'd like you to meet my sister and her husband, and their children."
    The desire in his eyes created an instant movie in Bo's brain. A balconied New Orleans hotel room with plush furniture, magnolia petals falling slowly through warm, moist air. A single blues sax echoing in narrow streets while on the bed ... She could run by Victoria's Secret over the weekend and pick up something tantalizing yet demure. Something to match the magnolias, whatever in hell color magnolias were.
    Bo felt a flush escaping her turtleneck and rising to stain her cheeks, if not her